OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Extended Version of GTGraffiti: Spray Painting Graffiti Art from Human Painting Motions with a Cable Driven Parallel Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We present GTGraffiti, a graffiti painting system from Georgia Tech that tackles challenges in art, hardware, and human-robot collaboration. The problem of painting graffiti in a human style is particularly challenging and requires a system-level approach because the robotics and art must be designed around each other. The robot must be highly dynamic over a large workspace while the artist must work within the robot's limitations. Our approach consists of three stages: artwork capture, robot hardware, and planning & control. We use motion capture to capture collaborator painting motions which are then composed and processed into a time-varying linear feedback controller for a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) to execute. In this work, we will describe the capturing process, the design and construction of a purpose-built CDPR, and the software for turning an artist's vision into control commands. Our work represents an important step towards faithfully recreating human graffiti artwork by demonstrating that we can reproduce artist motions up to 2m/s and 20m/s$^2$ within 9.3mm RMSE to paint artworks. Changes to the submitted manuscript are colored in blue.
Striking a new balance in accuracy and simplicity with the Probabilistic Inductive Miner
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Numerous process discovery techniques exist for generating process models that describe recorded executions of business processes. The models are meant to generalize executions into human-understandable modeling patterns, notably parallelism, and enable rigorous analysis of process deviations. However, well-defined models with parallelism returned by existing techniques are often too complex or generalize the recorded behavior too strongly to be trusted in a practical business context. We bridge this gap by introducing the Probabilistic Inductive Miner (PIM) based on the Inductive Miner framework. PIM compares in each step the most probable operators and structures based on frequency information in the data, which results in block-structured models with significantly higher accuracy. All design choices in PIM are based on business context requirements obtained through a user study with industrial process mining experts. PIM is evaluated quantitatively and in an novel kind of empirical study comparing users' trust in discovered model structures. The evaluations show that PIM strikes a unique trade-off between model accuracy and model complexity, that is conclusively preferred by users over all state-of-the-art process discovery methods.
Developers Who Vlog: Dismantling Stereotypes through Community and Identity
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Developers are more than "nerds behind computers all day", they lead a normal life, and not all take the traditional path to learn programming. However, the public still sees software development as a profession for "math wizards". To learn more about this special type of knowledge worker from their first-person perspective, we conducted three studies to learn how developers describe a day in their life through vlogs on YouTube and how these vlogs were received by the broader community. We first interviewed 16 developers who vlogged to identify their motivations for creating this content and their intention behind what they chose to portray. Second, we analyzed 130 vlogs (video blogs) to understand the range of the content conveyed through videos. Third, we analyzed 1176 comments from the 130 vlogs to understand the impact the vlogs have on the audience. We found that developers were motivated to promote and build a diverse community, by sharing different aspects of life that define their identity, and by creating awareness about learning and career opportunities in computing. They used vlogs to share a variety of how software developers work and live -- showcasing often unseen experiences, including intimate moments from their personal life. From our comment analysis, we found that the vlogs were valuable to the audience to find information and seek advice. Commenters sought opportunities to connect with others over shared triumphs and trials they faced that were also shown in the vlogs. As a central theme, we found that developers use vlogs to challenge the misconceptions and stereotypes around their identity, work-life, and well-being. These social stigmas are obstacles to an inclusive and accepting community and can deter people from choosing software development as a career. We also discuss the implications of using vlogs to support developers, researchers, and beyond.
Project Pipeline: Preservation, Persistence, and Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Preservation pipelines demonstrate extended value when digitized content is also computation ready. Expanding this to historical controlled vocabularies published in analog format requires additional steps if they are to be fully leveraged for research. This paper reports on work addressing this challenge. We report on a pipeline and project progress addressing three key goals: 1) transforming the 1910 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) linked data standard, 2) implementing persistent identifiers (PIDs) and launching our prototype ARK resolver, and 3) importing the 1910 LCSH into the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE) System to support automatic metadata generation and scholarly analysis of the historical record. The discussion considers the implications of our work in the broader context of preservation, and the conclusion summarizes our work and identifies next steps.
Reinforcement Learning with Evolutionary Trajectory Generator: A General Approach for Quadrupedal Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Recently reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for quadrupedal locomotion, which can save the manual effort in conventional approaches such as designing skill-specific controllers. However, due to the complex nonlinear dynamics in quadrupedal robots and reward sparsity, it is still difficult for RL to learn effective gaits from scratch, especially in challenging tasks such as walking over the balance beam. To alleviate such difficulty, we propose a novel RL-based approach that contains an evolutionary foot trajectory generator. Unlike prior methods that use a fixed trajectory generator, the generator continually optimizes the shape of the output trajectory for the given task, providing diversified motion priors to guide the policy learning. The policy is trained with reinforcement learning to output residual control signals that fit different gaits. We then optimize the trajectory generator and policy network alternatively to stabilize the training and share the exploratory data to improve sample efficiency. As a result, our approach can solve a range of challenging tasks in simulation by learning from scratch, including walking on a balance beam and crawling through the cave. To further verify the effectiveness of our approach, we deploy the controller learned in the simulation on a 12-DoF quadrupedal robot, and it can successfully traverse challenging scenarios with efficient gaits.
MMCoVaR: Multimodal COVID-19 Vaccine Focused Data Repository for Fake News Detection and a Baseline Architecture for Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

The outbreak of COVID-19 has resulted in an "infodemic" that has encouraged the propagation of misinformation about COVID-19 and cure methods which, in turn, could negatively affect the adoption of recommended public health measures in the larger population. In this paper, we provide a new multimodal (consisting of images, text and temporal information) labeled dataset containing news articles and tweets on the COVID-19 vaccine. We collected 2,593 news articles from 80 publishers for one year between Feb 16th 2020 to May 8th 2021 and 24184 Twitter posts (collected between April 17th 2021 to May 8th 2021). We combine ratings from two news media ranking sites: Medias Bias Chart and Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) to classify the news dataset into two levels of credibility: reliable and unreliable. The combination of two filters allows for higher precision of labeling. We also propose a stance detection mechanism to annotate tweets into three levels of credibility: reliable, unreliable and inconclusive. We provide several statistics as well as other analytics like, publisher distribution, publication date distribution, topic analysis, etc. We also provide a novel architecture that classifies the news data into misinformation or truth to provide a baseline performance for this dataset. We find that the proposed architecture has an F-Score of 0.919 and accuracy of 0.882 for fake news detection. Furthermore, we provide benchmark performance for misinformation detection on tweet dataset. This new multimodal dataset can be used in research on COVID-19 vaccine, including misinformation detection, influence of fake COVID-19 vaccine information, etc.
Learning to Drive on the Wrong Side of the Road: How American Computing Came to Rely on Conferences for Primary Publication
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

In contrast to other fields where conferences are typically for less polished or in-progress research, computing has long relied on referred conference papers as a venue for the final publication of completed research. While frequently a topic of informal discussion, debates about its efficacy, or library science research, the development of this phenomena has not been historically analyzed. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of the development of modern computing publications. It relies on semi-structured interviews with eight computing professors from diverse backgrounds to understand how researchers experienced changes in publication culture over time. Ultimately, the article concludes that the early presence of non-academic practitioners in research and a degree of "path dependence"or a tendency to continue on the established path rather than the most economically optimal one" allowed conferences to gain and hold prominence as the field exploded in popularity during the 1980s.
Designing a Combinatorial Financial Options Market
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

Financial options are contracts that specify the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a strike price by an expiration date. Standard exchanges offer options of predetermined strike values and trade options of different strikes independently, even for those written on the same underlying asset. Such independent market design can introduce arbitrage opportunities and lead to the thin market problem. The paper first proposes a mechanism that consolidates and matches orders on standard options related to the same underlying asset, while providing agents the flexibility to specify any custom strike value. The mechanism generalizes the classic double auction, runs in time polynomial to the number of orders, and poses no risk to the exchange, regardless of the value of the underlying asset at expiration. Empirical analysis on real-market options data shows that the mechanism can find new matches for options of different strike prices and reduce bid-ask spreads. Extending standard options written on a single asset, we propose and define a new derivative instrument -- combinatorial financial options that offer contract holders the right to buy or sell any linear combination of multiple underlying assets. We generalize our single-asset mechanism to match options written on different combinations of assets, and prove that optimal clearing of combinatorial financial options is coNP-hard. To facilitate market operations, we propose an algorithm that finds the exact optimal match through iterative constraint generation, and evaluate its performance on synthetically generated combinatorial options markets of different scales. As option prices reveal the market's collective belief of an underlying asset's future value, a combinatorial options market enables the expression of aggregate belief about future correlations among assets.
Instance-wise Graph-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The multivariate time series forecasting has attracted more and more attention because of its vital role in different fields in the real world, such as finance, traffic, and weather. In recent years, many research efforts have been proposed for forecasting multivariate time series. Although some previous work considers the interdependencies among different variables in the same timestamp, existing work overlooks the inter-connections between different variables at different time stamps. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient instance-wise graph-based framework to utilize the inter-dependencies of different variables at different time stamps for multivariate time series forecasting. The key idea of our framework is aggregating information from the historical time series of different variables to the current time series that we need to forecast. We conduct experiments on the Traffic, Electricity, and Exchange-Rate multivariate time series datasets. The results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Optimal To-Do List Gamification for Long Term Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Most people struggle with prioritizing work. While inexact heuristics have been developed over time, there is still no tractable principled algorithm for deciding which of the many possible tasks one should tackle in any given day, month, week, or year. Additionally, some people suffer from cognitive biases such as the present bias, leading to prioritization of their immediate experience over long-term consequences which manifests itself as procrastination and inefficient task prioritization. Our method utilizes optimal gamification to help people overcome these problems by incentivizing each task by a number of points that convey how valuable it is in the long-run. We extend the previous version of our optimal gamification method with added services for helping people decide which tasks should and should not be done when there is not enough time to do everything. To improve the efficiency and scalability of the to-do list solver, we designed a hierarchical procedure that tackles the problem from the top-level goals to fine-grained tasks. We test the accuracy of the incentivised to-do list by comparing the performance of the strategy with the points computed exactly using Value Iteration for a variety of case studies. These case studies were specifically designed to cover the corner cases to get an accurate judge of performance. Our method yielded the same performance as the exact method for all case studies. To demonstrate its functionality, we released an API that makes it easy to deploy our method in Web and app services. We assessed the scalability of our method by applying it to to-do lists with increasingly larger numbers of goals, sub-goals per goal, hierarchically nested levels of subgoals. We found that the method provided through our API is able to tackle fairly large to-do lists having a 576 tasks. This indicates that our method is suitable for real-world applications.
Netmarble AI Center's WMT21 Automatic Post-Editing Shared Task Submission
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper describes Netmarble's submission to WMT21 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) Shared Task for the English-German language pair. First, we propose a Curriculum Training Strategy in training stages. Facebook Fair's WMT19 news translation model was chosen to engage the large and powerful pre-trained neural networks. Then, we post-train the translation model with different levels of data at each training stages. As the training stages go on, we make the system learn to solve multiple tasks by adding extra information at different training stages gradually. We also show a way to utilize the additional data in large volume for APE tasks. For further improvement, we apply Multi-Task Learning Strategy with the Dynamic Weight Average during the fine-tuning stage. To fine-tune the APE corpus with limited data, we add some related subtasks to learn a unified representation. Finally, for better performance, we leverage external translations as augmented machine translation (MT) during the post-training and fine-tuning. As experimental results show, our APE system significantly improves the translations of provided MT results by -2.848 and +3.74 on the development dataset in terms of TER and BLEU, respectively. It also demonstrates its effectiveness on the test dataset with higher quality than the development dataset.
The Impact of User Demographics and Task Types on Cross-App Mobile Search
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Recent developments in the mobile app industry have resulted in various types of mobile apps, each targeting a different need and a specific audience. Consequently, users access distinct apps to complete their information need tasks. This leads to the use of various apps not only separately, but also collaboratively in the same session to achieve a single goal. Recent work has argued the need for a unified mobile search system that would act as metasearch on users' mobile devices. The system would identify the target apps for the user's query, submit the query to the apps, and present the results to the user in a unified way. In this work, we aim to deepen our understanding of user behavior while accessing information on their mobile phones by conducting an extensive analysis of various aspects related to the search process. In particular, we study the effect of task type and user demographics on their behavior in interacting with mobile apps. Our findings reveal trends and patterns that can inform the design of a more effective mobile information access environment.
Continuous Homeostatic Reinforcement Learning for Self-Regulated Autonomous Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Homeostasis is a prevalent process by which living beings maintain their internal milieu around optimal levels. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that living beings learn to act to predicatively ensure homeostasis (allostasis). A classical theory for such regulation is drive reduction, where a function of the difference between the current and the optimal internal state. The recently introduced homeostatic regulated reinforcement learning theory (HRRL), by defining within the framework of reinforcement learning a reward function based on the internal state of the agent, makes the link between the theories of drive reduction and reinforcement learning. The HRRL makes it possible to explain multiple eating disorders. However, the lack of continuous change in the internal state of the agent with the discrete-time modeling has been so far a key shortcoming of the HRRL theory. Here, we propose an extension of the homeostatic reinforcement learning theory to a continuous environment in space and time, while maintaining the validity of the theoretical results and the behaviors explained by the model in discrete time. Inspired by the self-regulating mechanisms abundantly present in biology, we also introduce a model for the dynamics of the agent internal state, requiring the agent to continuously take actions to maintain homeostasis. Based on the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and function approximation with neural networks, we derive a numerical scheme allowing the agent to learn directly how its internal mechanism works, and to choose appropriate action policies via reinforcement learning and an appropriate exploration of the environment. Our numerical experiments show that the agent does indeed learn to behave in a way that is beneficial to its survival in the environment, making our framework promising for modeling animal dynamics and decision-making.
Exploring the Use of Static and Dynamic Analysis to Improve the Performance of the Mining Sandbox Approach for Android Malware Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The Android mining sandbox approach consists in running dynamic analysis tools on a benign version of an Android app and recording every call to sensitive APIs. Later, one can use this information to (a) prevent calls to other sensitive APIs (those not previously recorded) or (b) run the dynamic analysis tools again in a different version of the app -- in order to identify possible malicious behavior. Although the use of dynamic analysis for mining Android sandboxes has been empirically investigated before, little is known about the potential benefits of combining static analysis with the mining sandbox approach for identifying malicious behavior. As such, in this paper we present the results of two empirical studies: The first is a non-exact replication of a previous research work from Bao et al., which compares the performance of test case generation tools for mining Android sandboxes. The second is a new experiment to investigate the implications of using taint analysis algorithms to complement the mining sandbox approach in the task to identify malicious behavior. Our study brings several findings. For instance, the first study reveals that a static analysis component of DroidFax (a tool used for instrumenting Android apps in the Bao et al. study) contributes substantially to the performance of the dynamic analysis tools explored in the previous work. The results of the second study show that taint analysis is also practical to complement the mining sandboxes approach, improve the performance of the later strategy in at most 28.57%.
Towards optimized actions in critical situations of soccer games with deep reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Soccer is a sparse rewarding game: any smart or careless action in critical situations can change the result of the match. Therefore players, coaches, and scouts are all curious about the best action to be performed in critical situations, such as the times with a high probability of losing ball possession or scoring a goal. This work proposes a new state representation for the soccer game and a batch reinforcement learning to train a smart policy network. This network gets the contextual information of the situation and proposes the optimal action to maximize the expected goal for the team. We performed extensive numerical experiments on the soccer logs made by InStat for 104 European soccer matches. The results show that in all 104 games, the optimized policy obtains higher rewards than its counterpart in the behavior policy. Besides, our framework learns policies that are close to the expected behavior in the real world. For instance, in the optimized policy, we observe that some actions such as foul, or ball out can be sometimes more rewarding than a shot in specific situations.